By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

Four in 10 parents of K-12 students are worried for their children’s safety at school, according to a new Gallup poll.

The poll was collected before the school shooting that took place in Minneapolis on Wednesday, and is part of a multi-year trend showing an uptick in parental concern for school safety.

Gallup has monitored parental concern in this area for nearly three decades since 1998. The latest figure of 41% is higher than the long-term average of 34% and “is consistent with readings from the past three years, ranging from 38% to 44%,” according to Gallup Senior Editor Lydia Saad.

Parental concern reached an all-time high in 1999 at 55% after the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, where 14 were killed, 21 were wounded and the two shooters also took their own lives. It tapered down from there to an all-time low of just 15% in 2008, but has generally been on the rise since, dipping slightly before the 2017-18 school year.

The number of concerned parents rose by 10% from 2019 to 2022, from 34% to 44%, in line with an increase in school shootings since the pandemic. (Gallup did not survey parents in 2020 or 2021 due to school closures during the pandemic).

There have been over 420 school shootings in the U.S. since Columbine, 160 of which have taken place in the past five years, according to health policy think tank KFF.

“The sustained rise in fear since 2016-2019 is not confined to any particular category of parent but has grown among all major demographic, political and socioeconomic subgroups,” according to Gallup and this year marks “the longest stretch of continuously high parental fear about children’s safety” since 1998.